It does use a bunch of reasonably well understood tricks to get people hooked and to buy it, which I will have no qualms about using one day

I would love to use the trick of having Penny Arcade write 2 comics in a row which showed the game in a positive light. In September of 2010 Penny Arcade ran those 2 comics and Notch had so many registrations that it took his servers down for almost a week. In the end, when the servers came back up he went from roughly 65,000 alpha users to over 300,000 alpha users (I was one of them).

I think that was the single point which really launched Minecraft.

I use to be utter addicted to MC. But I haven't played it for months. I find that more and more I only do my gaming in 10 to 20 minute chunks. I think there are a lot of people in that position and this may be a reason that mobile games and the "casual gaming" revolution are happening.

I'm tempted to use traditional patches, check for updates ingame and inform player, then just NSIS exe files which find the installation per registry (windows) and apply.But I'm not sure with linux and mac, but it should work similarly...

We don't do any auto patching. Used Webstart in the past (shit). Did consider getdown at one point but never got around to it. All we do now is just have a check run on the title screen that asks our server what the latest version of the game is and pops up a dialog to tell the player there's a newer version available.

As soon as Steam for Linux is ready I think we're going to totally ditch direct sales and downloads.

I like the games your company made. Really liked how you did the electricity effect that I saw in the Revenage youtube video(@0.40). Is there any information you can share about how you implemented it?

I like the games your company made. Really liked how you did the electricity effect that I saw in the Revenage youtube video(@0.40). Is there any information you can share about how you implemented it?

/* * Copyright (c) 2003-onwards Shaven Puppy Ltd * All rights reserved. * * Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without * modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are * met: * * * Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright * notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. * * * Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright * notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the * documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. * * * Neither the name of 'Shaven Puppy' nor the names of its contributors * may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software * without specific prior written permission. * * THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS * "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED * TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR * PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT OWNER OR * CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, * EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, * PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR * PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF * LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING * NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS * SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE. */packageworm.effects;

getdown is extremely simple and very robust. If I were to start implementing an auto patching system today, that's what I'd use.

its just that my games all have the C++ games standard structure, exe files and folders with game content.with getdown all game contents have to be in jars =/

I've been in contact with a guy implementing a framework for auto-updating jars for an installed application and still have the executable functional. He showed me a preview and it worked just like he said. In your game the user would get some sort of message that there is an update available then if they click on it their game will be updated, with installer progress bar and everything. He is probrably a few months off from finishing but I can put you in contact with him.

One thing Oddlabs did back in the day was release using SVN. They had a SVN client built into Tribal Trouble. A very elegant and nifty solution but unfortunately SVN is mysteriously dog slow. That's the reason I've been looking in to GIT lately but I've been thwarted by beards who have tried to make GIT as unusably difficult as possible.

<sudden epiphany>Hmm. GIT would probably work quite well as a version delivery mechanism too.

WRT Git. If you use just the subset most projects use its pretty straightforward. However it has a *lot* of stuff in there pretty close to the surface which is really just for projects like the Linux kernel. Also a lot of the git people that help *are* kernel folks, pushing this odd and complicated stuff even closer to the surface...

I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.--Albert Einstein

I think here we are bumping into on of my fundamental misunderstandings How do Chaz, myself and Allicorn work together with git? At the very least I want a fully-backed up canonical representation of the status quo on my server somewhere which is what we're all ultimately working against.

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